I’m aiming to do over the first couple of months of 2013, to come to various towns throughout the United States and prospectively parts of Europe & England to code, bike, code some more, bike and generally hang out with the coders that are making waves and getting work done in the particular cities that I’m visiting. That’s where my question comes into play.
What towns should I visit, and who’s interested in hacking some code, talking shop, biking around town, showing me the places to be and generally hanging out? A few of the cities that are on my list of places to visit already include the following.
United States Stops
- Spokane, Washington
- Seattle, Washington
- Portland, Oregon (this doesn’t really count, since I live here)
- Oakland, California
- San Francisco, California
- Los Angeles, California
- Orange County, California
- San Diego, California
- Austin, Texas
- Phoenix, Arizona
- New York, New York
- Boca Raton, Florida
- Jacksonville, Florida
- New Orleans, Louisiana,
- Charlotte, North Carolina
England & Europe Stops
- London, England
- Edinburgh, Scotland
- Berlin, Germany
- Amsterdam, Netherlands
- Copenhagen, Denmark
So that’s the list so far. I’ve got a lot of logistics to figure out. But it still leaves the question, who else is up for a visit? Is there a user group in your town that I should stop at? Anything related to PaaS, Cloud Computing, or Coding & Software Craftsmanship you’d like me to come speak about?
The things I’ll be aiming to hack on and blog, code, discuss and find out what each local community is focusing on and trying to make progress on includes these things:
Key Discussion Topics : I’d love to talk with as many people as possible about these.
- PaaS – Platform as a Service Technologies. What are you using? AppHarbor, AppFog, Tier 3, AWS, Azure or something else?
- Cloud Computing – What do you see as the greatest benefits, but more importantly what are the greatest issues to resolve and make progress around in your country, community and in your day to day job?
- What’s the stack, framework and languages that you deal with on a daily basis? What’s your polyglot soup and what trends are you seeing?
Polyglot Soup : Are you hitting the Node.js, .NET, Java, Ruby on Rails, Sinatra or is the focus elsewhere?
- What’s the feel for Ruby on Rails, Sinatra and the ruby community in general in your area?
- How’s the Java vs. .NET peacetime activities (cuz ya know the war is over). How are each holding up under Oracle and Microsoft respectively? Are you still using them anywhere?
- What’s the Node.js community like in your area? Are you doing full JavaScript stack development yet?
- Hitting any of the outlier languages that have big impacts like; Go, Scala, F#, Erlang or any of the others? Powerful languages with an extremely small development community. I’m always curious about the activities here.
Feel free to send me an e-mail, call me, txt me, message me, skype me, or please comment below! I’m open to all ideas and thoughts. If you have a couch I can crash on, have a suggestion about a cool hotel, an awesome place to visit in one of these cities, please let me know. Over the next few months I’ll be trying to figure out this tour of mine and will be finalizing the locations soon, which I’ll announce and blog heavily on what we’ll hack, etc. I’ll also alude to the biking adventures I’ll partake upon.
Biking wild and coding crazy, cheers!